Tag Archives: sustaining an improvement effort

Many, if not most organizations make attempts to improve their work. But no matter which specific methods predominate, almost all of these initiatives aimed at gaining greater efficiency, quality, speed, and/or customer delight have two important things in common:

They generally produce some improvements

Then they peter out

For an organization to go through a cultural change so that continuous improvement becomes the new way of working (not just a one-time ‘program’), we need to pay close attention to the ‘soft’ part of the improvement model.

This will enable us to smooth the path, remove the obstacles, and continue to lead, communicate, and motivate both emotionally and intellectually.

Following are six common causes of discontinuous improvement:

Neglecting aligning individual or team goals with those of the organization

As noted in our previous post, the biggest challenge to continuous improvement is not making the improvements, but rather making the effort continuous.

For an organization to go through a cultural change so that continuous improvement becomes the new way of working (not “just a program”), we need to pay close attention to the soft part of the improvement model.

This will enable us to smooth the path, remove the obstacles, and continue to lead, communicate, and motivate both emotionally and intellectually.

Following are six common causes of discontinuous improvement:

Neglecting aligning individual or team goals with those of the organization

Insufficient communication between management, the workforce, teams and CI leaders

Delegating leadership, which is a responsibility that should stay with senior management

Many, if not most organizations have implemented programs such as Six Sigma, Lean, TQM, or other variously named methods of systematically improving the flow of work; and almost all of these initiatives aimed at gaining greater efficiency, quality, speed, and/or customer delight have two important things in common:

They generally produce some improvements

Then they peter out

So much opportunity can be found, just by systematically studying the work flow, gathering the data, and applying basic improvement tools or techniques that it is hard to fail to make some gains at the start. Once an organization is trained in systematic process improvement and sees some successes, one might expect the system of improvement to be self-sustaining and even accelerating!

But more often, it behaves like one of those self-extinguishing cigarettes which snuffs itself out after 5 minutes of inattention.

It turns out that making some improvements is the easy part; making them continuous is the hard part.

Initial improvements are often the low-hanging fruit, accomplished without making any fundamental changes in anyone’s lives.

But low hanging fruit is quickly plucked. Pretty soon, the next best opportunity will encroach on someone’s turf. It may challenge someone’s conventional wisdom or seem to threaten someone’s job security. Or the search for better ways may just come to seem unnecessary, because the organization is doing well enough and it is easier and less risky to keep things the same.

Without active effective leadership, the attempt to become a continuously improving organization will likely falter. For an organization to go through a cultural change so that this becomes the new way of working, not a ‘program’ but simply ‘the right way to manage’, we need to pay close attention to the ‘soft’ part of the improvement model to smooth the path, remove the obstacles, and continue to lead, communicate, and motivate both emotionally and intellectually.

Latest News…

Finding the Right Tool for the Job

It’s been said that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Such is not the challenge we face today! Over the past 50 years, a tremendous number of analysis and problem-solving tools have been developed and are available to deploy in the unending quest for better service to customers, producing greater value with less waste. In today’s world, the efficiency and efficacy of continuous improvement depends on selecting the best analysis and problem-solving tool at the right time.

To move to a system of continuous improvement requires that organizations develop the right mindset and use the right language and tools every day, in all their activities. That is a major culture change for most organizations.

But once people know what to work on, the question becomes which tools and methods will help you achieve your goals.

With our vast experience in a variety of industries, cultures and countries, we work with you to identify those methods and teach you to build your skills so that you can apply those methods and tools to future problems and opportunities.